The degradation of cultural artefacts is usually understood in a purely negative vein: the erosion of physical integrity is associated with a parallel loss of cultural information. This article asks if it is possible to adopt an interpretive approach in which entropic processes of decomposition and decay, though implicated in the destruction of cultural memory traces on one register, contribute to the recovery of memory on another register. The article tracks the entanglement of cultural and natural histories through the residual material culture of a derelict homestead in Montana. In conclusion, the article suggests that deposits of degraded material, though inappropriate for recovery in conventional conservation strategies, may be understood through the application of a collaborative interpretive ethic, allowing other-than-human agencies to participate in the telling of stories about particular places.

Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things

Scholarly interest in ruins and derelict spaces has intensified over the last decade. We assess a broad selection of the resulting literature and identify several key themes. We focus on how ruins may be used to critically examine capitalist and state manifestations of power; we consider the way in which ruins may challenge dominant ways of relating to the past; and we look at how ruins may complicate strategies for practically and ontologically ordering space. We speculate about the motivations for this surge of current academic interest, draw out resonances with current trends in geographical thinking, and suggest directions for future research.

Reckoning with ruins

This essay identifies the potential of an emerging archaeological turn for anthropology—and for archaeology itself. I argue that despite the critiques of the past two decades, the temporality of modernity and a belief in its exceptionalism still structure much of anthropological thought, as exemplified in the division of archaeology and ethnography and in the subfield of historical archaeology and its dystopic treatment of modern urban ruins. But alternative temporalities and analytical possibilities are also emerging, ones attentive to the folding and recycling of cultural elements that Walter Benjamin described with such philosophical depth. On the ground, Benjamin’s insights can be put to use by paying greater attention to the spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism’s creative destruction, to the social life of ruins, and to projects that challenge the linear divide between modernity and antiquity. Releasing anthropology from progressive time necessarily entails a reintegration of the subfields and a dir...

http://www.osea-cite.org/class/quetzil/Quetzil2010_Current-Anthropology_Comment_on_Shannon_Dawdy_Clockpunk-Anthropology.pdf

Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

A diagnosis of crocodile feeding traces on larger mammal bone, with fossil examples from the Plio-Pleistocene Olduvai Basin, Tanzania

Holes and grooves: the contribution of microscopy and taphonomy to the problem of art origins☆

Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas. eds. New York: Routledge, 2001. 208 pp.

Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past

The way people organize living spaces defines and is defined by all aspects of their lives - social, political, economic and ritual. People meaningfully produce, use and experience living spaces. T...

Archaeological ethnographies: Social dynamics of outdoor space

Research Potential of Anthropological Museum Collections

A comparison of two seventeenth-century colonial encounters in North America, examining the Pueblo–Spanish interaction in New Mexico and the Mohawk–Dutch situation in New York. I focus on material culture flows, the role of women, forms of labor that were extracted in each setting and how each of these contributed to power relations and identity construction.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20853093

Colonialism, Material Culture, and Identity in the Rio Grande and Hudson River Valleys

In this comparative study of colonial tavern sites, it is suggested that these sites fulfilled a variety of functions, conditioned in part by the degree of urbanization of their settings. Four sites, two in urban areas and two in rural areas, are compared by means of a Brainerd-Robinson Coefficient of Agreement, showing a clear urban-rural difference. The urban tavern artifact assemblages seem to indicate activities related to drinking and “socializing,” while the rural assemblages suggest food consumption, a probable correlate of the overnight accomodation function of some taverns.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25615502.pdf

Nan A. Rothschild

Papers

Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past

Archaeological ethnographies: Social dynamics of outdoor space

Research Potential of Anthropological Museum Collections

Colonialism, Material Culture, and Identity in the Rio Grande and Hudson River Valleys

City tavern, country tavern: An analysis of four colonial sites